Local History

The First Air Traffic Controller

Archie William League is shown on duty in his summer office. Note the rolled-up flags in the wheelbarrow, and the dangling lunch box. His other equipment included a folding chair, drinking water, and a pad for taking notes.

Archie William League, is generally considered the first air traffic controller. 

League had been a licensed pilot, and licensed engine and aircraft mechanic. He had barnstormed around in Missouri and Illinois with his "flying circus," prior to St. Louis hiring him as the first U.S. air traffic controller in 1929. He was stationed at the airfield in St. Louis, Missouri (now known as Lambert-St. Louis International Airport). Before the installation of a radio tower, he was a flagman who directed traffic via flags. His first "control tower" consisted of a wheelbarrow on which he mounted a beach umbrella for the summer heat. In it he carried a beach chair, his lunch, water, a note pad and a pair of signal flags to direct the aircraft. He used a checkered flag to indicate to the pilot "GO", i.e. proceed, or a red flag to indicate the pilot should "HOLD" their position. He kept warm out on the field in the winters by wearing a padded flying suit. When a radio tower was installed in the early 1930s, he became the airport's first radio controller. 

League went on to earn a degree in aeronautical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. League joined the Federal service in 1937 at the Bureau of Air Commerce (the precursor to the Civil Aeronautics Authority, and the Federal Aviation Administration). He rose rapidly through the ranks as an Air Traffic controller, served as a pilot in World War II (where he rose to the rank of Colonel) then progressed to his first top management position in 1956, as Assistant Regional Administrator of the Central Region. He next went to Washington headquarters as Chief of the Planning Division (Planning and Development Office) in 1958. After a short assignment as Director, Bureau of National Capital Airports, he moved to Fort Worth as the Director of Southwest Region. His next assignment was in May 1965, relocating to Washington headquarters as Director of Air Traffic Services, where he became head of the staff responsible for the safe and efficient operation of the nation’s air traffic control system. He eventually became FAA's Air Traffic Service director and retired as an Assistant Administrator for Appraisal in 1973. During his 36-year career he helped develop the federal air traffic control system. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) named the Archie League Medal of Safety Awards after him. 

He was born in 1907 at Poplar Bluff, Missouri in Butler County. He died on October 1, 1986 at the age of 79 in Annandale, Virginia.

Republished from Wikipedia, Archie William League, Creative Commons License.

Cypress Memories 

By Jason Wilson 

The area had once been forest and field, meadowland and swamp. A healthy stream ran through the area, fed by many springs at its headwaters and from several tributaries along its length, as it coursed through the region of Northwest St. Louis County. These springs also gave the stream its name; Coldwater. This was highland area, not far from the river named Missouri. It had long been settled, first by the native tribes, and then the French, who gave it the name, Marais des Liards. They were soon followed by the Spanish and then the Americans. It was also crossed by an old Indian trail along the high ground. This trail became a road, and was used by the settlers traveling overland from the settlements of St. Louis and St. Charles. This trail was soon paved with crushed stone, the first of its kind in St. Louis County. It became known as the, “St. Charles Rock Road.” 

Emmet and Wanza Wilson, circa 1947.

Time passed, farms arose, and the fertile soil was heavily worked. The population grew, and in time, the late 1940s arrived. After WWII, there were many families seeking the new life in “suburbia.” This was virgin land and several developers had ideas. One in particular, Charles F. Vatterott, Jr., dreamed of a planned community with homes, stores, churches, and schools. This was when my family arrived, or more correctly, my parents and my two older siblings. 

Like many people, my dad was eager to build a new home far from the city. In fact, he told me that many of his friends chided him for wanting to build, “so damned far out in the country.” He had whittled his choices down to two plots. The first was along a narrow country lane named Clayton Road (near another dusty path called Spoede Road, about a quarter mile south of the “new” Highway 40 and one quarter mile west of Lindbergh Boulevard). 

The second piece of property that he had in mind was along another farm road called Cypress. Cypress Road ran north from St. Charles Rock Road, east of Lindbergh Boulevard (which had been recently upgraded with a series of what were then, state-of-the-art cloverleaf intersections). Cypress also intersected with Natural Bridge Road, just west of Lambert Field and east of the small community of Bridgeton, Missouri. This was the parcel that my parents finally chose. 

A beautiful home was built, among the first homes along this road, with one of them being an old, surviving farmhouse. This home, designed by my father, was built in the late 40s contemporary style and would be modest by today’s standards. The house was built of block and brick, with wooden floors, a hip roof, a full basement, and there was a large breezeway connecting the house to an oversize two-car garage. 

Other homes, also privately built and on large lots, all joined one another along Cypress in short order. A cul-de-sac was platted out with more such homes on generous lots. This street was given the heady name of Cypress Gardens Court. More such development was planned, and Cypress was only the beginning. There would be future development to the east of Cypress, all the way to Coldwater Creek. 

From the book, St. Ann, Missouri - Thirty-Five Years, by Sue Smith

However, business plans changed; there was such a clamor for quality homes in this newly founded suburban area that Mr. Vatterott saw that it would make more business sense to continue his idea of smaller homes on smaller lots. The idea seemed to be to give more folks a chance at suburbia. These homes, though smaller, were well-constructed, and the lots that they were built on allowed for expansion as families grew in size. Deciding to stay in what was a comfortable and affordable neighborhood was what many families took advantage of, making changes to their homes. The community grew and the Cypress Community of Homeowners also grew. Mr. Vatterott’s planned community was named St. Ann. It held a rich variety of homes and businesses and proved quite successful. In the 50s, it was a marvelous place to be a child. 

I remember my friends and I playing all day, from sun-up to sun-down, running through yards, playing in Coldwater Creek, crawdad hunting, and riding bikes. 

There was such a variety of foods on the trees that no one went hungry. We had peaches, apples, cherries, grapes, and pears. The family of a good friend of mine owned a huge Quarter Horse named Guy, and he could carry several of us throughout the neighborhood. 

In the late 1950s, a small food shop (a forerunner of the convenience stores now found on every corner) opened up on Cypress, about a half-mile south of my home, where a branch of Coldwater Creek crossed under Cypress. This was a great source of treats and inexpensive toys for the neighborhood children. We bought many balsa wood planes and other trinkets there. 

Mine was a bucolic, almost nineteenth-century childhood, given the activities in which we participated, yet it was set firmly in the mid-twentieth century. We had walk-in and drive-in movie theatres, grocery stores, dime stores, a store dedicated to televisions, and one specifically for shoes. St. Ann had become a suburb in its own right by the 1950s, and was self-governing, with its own police force. My parents knew the police chief and many of the local officers. St. Ann was a “people community.” You knew your neighbors, you knew the grocer, and you knew the cop on the beat. It was more than just a suburb of St. Louis; it was a unique small town. 
 

My family moved from our home on Cypress in November 1963. Traffic on Cypress Road was growing beyond its capabilities. We moved to the newest of the planned communities: Carrollton, just a few miles west in the neighboring suburb of Bridgeton, Missouri. Carrollton also had good schools, churches, and a large shopping center, but the homes were decidedly of a mid-century Modern style. Tract homes, certainly, but more modern than any that had existed in the area before. 

Thus, when I was 12 years old, my life in Northwest County entered a second act. My early childhood was spent on Cypress Road in St. Ann, a childhood I hold dear and remember fondly. My adolescence was spent in Bridgeton, and many adventures began there as well. I’m proud to have so many happy memories of these great communities, just two of the many that exist in Northwest St. Louis County.

Streetcars Changed the Course of St. Charles Rock Road 

By Wayne Brasler

Thanks to the M-G-M film musical “Meet Me in St. Louis” the city will forever be associated with its trolley system.

 In fact it was one of the most comprehensive in the nation, and notable because so much of the streetcar lines traveled not on streets but through woodlands and rural areas to far distant spots.  Including the city of St. Charles across the Missouri River!

The streetcar line in the film really did exist; it was the Hodiamont line and it passed the west of the Wellston Loop at Easton (now Martin Luther King Boulevard) Avenue at Hodiamont.

That was where the St. Charles and Western streetcar line commenced its journey.  The history of the Rock Road, from its beginning as a westward overland passage from the Mississippi to the Missouri, is well-known.  But few people know the Rock Road had for many decades as a component a heavy-duty electric railroad line from Wellston to St. Charles.

 Few histories accurately record the route of the line and few record the fact that the present location of the Rock Road isn’t the original location for much of its route. That’s because bit by bit the road was rerouted to conform to the rail line.

The line was built by the enterprising James Houseman beginning in 1897 in stages westward, originally terminating on the east side of the Missouri River, where passengers rode ferry boats across to St. Charles.  Then in 1904 a bridge was built over the river and the trolley line terminal still stands just off where its exit landed in St. Charles.

The line was double-tracked in the middle of the road west from Wellston.  Just east of Lucas and Hunt Road it traveled over a humped wooden bridge with the rails laid in the wood.  At Lucas and Hunt the line met the St. Peters line, a single-tracked operation which went north up Lucas and Hunt to Natural Bridge.

West of Lucas and Hunt each track spread to the south and north sides of the Rock Road.  Later, when the Road was widened to four lanes from two, the streetcars rode in the middle of the road until reaching St. Vincent’s Lane in Pagedale, where they spread to the outside lanes.

In the early days the line met the Cross Country line which came north up Ferguson Avenue from Vernon to serve visitors to St. Vincent’s Sanitarium.  At Lucas Lane, which is now Normandy Drive, there was a siding to serve the Normandie Country Club and Golf Course.  At North and South Road both rails moved to the north side of the Rock Road on an impressive rail highway.

 At Brown Road (which was Birdie Avenue), where the car barn was located (the bus barn north of it still stands, hidden behind Walgreen’s Drugs), the line narrowed to one rail, and at what is now Cypress Road, the Bridgeton Line branched off to head north for what is now Lambert Field.

Most histories have the line following the Rock Road right out to St. Charles, but not so.  At what is now Lindbergh, the rails turned northwestward to reach the town of Bridgeton, eventually curving to where the Rock Road now runs just west of I-270.  The line crossed Natural Bridge just east of its junction with the Rock Road and a siding there served Westlake Amusement park at that junction.  Many histories have the streetcar running in front of Westlake Park, but it actually ran in back.

The streetcar line west of Westlake Park was built on an embankment because a flood plain commenced at that location, and therein lies another tale.  With rail traffic declining because of the automobile, the streetcar line was cut back to Dammerman Stop, one third mile west of Woodson Road at what is now Airline Avenue, in 1932 and assumed the name of the Woodson Road streetcar.  That’s because Woodson Road was not located where it is now, but west of that location and today it survives as Edmundson Road.

When the streetcar stopped running west of Woodson, the state was able to recreate St. Charles Rock Road west of the junction with Natural Bridge Road to highway standards.  St. Charles Rock Road originally west of I-270 meandered along the Fee Fee Creek, which was prone to flooding.  When the Road was relocated to the route of the streetcar line to St. Charles, the road was renamed Old St. Charles and later Boenker Road, which today is unfit to drive on.

 In fact, before that, several portions of the Rock Road in the St. John and St. Ann areas were called many other names before commencing at Adie Road and continuing west as Old St. Charles Road.

 Amazingly, parts of the streetcar right-of-way remain, most notably at Fee Fee, where “Electric Avenue” at one time stood just north of the Rock Road and a short patch of right-of-way and electrical sustation still stands on the west side of the road.  The right-of-way is also visible north on McKelvey Road, where it follows a creek and winds through a townhouse development, poles still in place and, most amazingly, a short stretch of the embankment is visible on the south side of the Rock Road just east of Earth City Expressway.

James Houseman was very proud of his electric line, nicknamed the “All Saints” because it served so many cemeteries.  His luxurious cars included toilet facilities and phones, kept to schedules, stopped wherever passengers awaited (at night lighting newspapers to signal the motorman to halt) and were equipped with loud air horns and gigantic headlights to pierce the dark countryside.

What a saga!  And now almost all forgotten or, if remembered, gotten wrong.  Not now.

A Tardy Pardon and Other Buried Treasures

By Kyle Schrader

As he picks up flowers spilled by April showers, Kenneth “Ken” Cox points to a grave etched as being shared by Benjamin, George, and Dennis Lackland and explains, “When there was a flu epidemic, it was not unusual to have two children buried together, or a mother and child.”
 

Cox, chairman of trustees of the Fee Fee Cemetery Association, is perusing the grounds, located on Old Saint Charles Road in Bridgeton. He notes the poor readability of the Lacklands’ grave marker: “It’s worn limestone. Limestone just doesn’t stand up to the weather.” Lastly, he points out that the monument, like many others there, is an obelisk (think Washington Monument).

A man with appreciation for the details and history of Fee Fee Cemetery, Cox has held his position as chairman for approximately a decade. Before that, he “joined the church in 1986 and got on the board of trustees, gosh, probably 20 years ago, give or take.”

Cox verifies the historical significance, stating, “It is the first and oldest active cemetery west of the Mississippi.” That distinction “used to belong to one down around Ste. Genevieve, but they closed it and the church around 100 years ago.” He continues, “You’ve got old cemeteries out in the woods somewhere, but we don’t know that.”
 

Besides the Lackland family name, one scanning headstones might also see the locally recognizable Adie, Hickman, Hanley, Averill, and Branneky surnames, just to name a few. Regarding family plots, Cox asserts, “People bought lots back on the 1930s and are just now using the rest of them.”

But perhaps the most interesting resident in the cemetery is Confederate soldier James Morgan Utz, who died in 1864. “He was caught as a spy here in St. Louis,” Cox relates. “He didn’t claim innocence, but somehow somebody got ahold of Lincoln for a pardon. He was hung the day after Christmas in downtown St. Louis, wherever the Union headquarters was, because the pardon was not in time.”

The original Fee Fee Baptist Church, the oldest Baptist church west of the Mississippi, was organized in 1807, and the original church structure was built when land was deeded for a church and cemetery in 1815. That small wooden structure (the exact whereabouts of which remain unknown and the subject of rumor and speculation) was replaced in 1828-1829 by the brick Old Fee Fee Meeting House, which still stands today and is the oldest house of worship in St. Louis County. In 1870, a new church building was erected at Fee Fee and St. Charles Rock Road (then replaced by another church, the current one, built at the same location in 1975), and the Meeting House was converted into a cemetery office and caretaker home. It remains so to this day, with caretakers Pat and Brenda Moutray residing there with son Chris.

Just behind the Meeting House is the “Preachers’ Area,” where only past preachers of the church are buried. And as one drives up to the Meeting House, to the right is “Cremation Garden,” where the ashes of the deceased are laid to rest. There is also a gate still standing in the middle of the yard, a gate to nowhere, as it were, that was put up in 1914. “It’s too narrow now,” Cox clarifies. “A car or truck would tear it up,” as it was made for buggies. He indicates a particularly large slab of a headstone, weighing several tons, and marvels at how it must have been brought in via horse and buggy.

Referring to some of the older burials in the cemetery, Cox attests, “We do have some Revolutionary War burials in here, but they were moved from other unknown cemeteries.” He adds that he has “no idea” about the number of graves, because “there are a lot of unmarked graves.” He can, however, often tell if the ground has been disturbed. “If the ground’s real dry, sometimes I can tell whether it’s been disturbed or not.”

In addition to pointing out the popularity of obelisks on the property, Cox comments that there are a number of headstones with Masonic symbols, indicating the numerous Freemasons. And finally, he shares a story about why Civil War-era Union headstones tend to be flat or curved at the top, while their Confederate counterparts are often pointed like a rooftop: “So no damn Yankee can sit on them,” or so the saying goes.

Occasionally, Pattonville High School brings its history students to the cemetery for field trips.  In 1957, Ruth E. Abraham wrote As a Tree Planted, about the history of Fee Fee Cemetery, and as the rebuilding of Fee Free Road afforded more space to be used for future burials, there is undoubtedly more history left to be written.

Bridgeton’s Hidden Historic House
 by Kyle Schrader

Ready for the tour!  Bridgeton's Payne-Gentry House.  

Photos by Cindy Lay, Bridgeton Historical Commission.

The desk of Dr. William Elbridge Payne 

Countless history buffs and casual vacationers routinely travel hundreds or thousands of miles to gain some culture, enjoyment, and education by viewing some of the historic landmarks that America has to offer. But before area readers embark to witness the largest beagle in the world (Cottonwood, Idaho), the neon sign graveyard (Las Vegas, Nevada), or the world’s largest thermometer (Baker, California), they should first look out their backdoors, to this area’s own historic treasure, the Payne-Gentry House.

Jeanne Keirle is the chairperson of the Bridgeton Historical Commission, and Cindy Lay is the secretary of the Commission. Their group is responsible for promoting the House, doing tours, and taking care of and monitoring the structure. “The [Bridgeton] Parks and Recreation Department does the heavy labor,” Lay adds.

The House was built in 1870, originally as a summer house that belonged to the Payne-Gentry family. The family’s tangled lineages can be traced back to John Post, who in 1821 moved his family from Vermont to the Chesterfield, Missouri area. “They got tired of being flooded in Chesterfield,” explains Keirle, “so they moved north to what is now Bridgeton in 1844.” The family came to have vast land holdings in the Northwest St. Louis County area.

Eventually, Dr. William Elbridge Payne came to live at the House and opened his office in the basement. The irony of the name “Dr. Payne” does not elude Lay, who points out, “It is the only house on the National Register of Historic Places, or historic house in general, that had a doctor’s office attached to it. The doctor’s office was added after the House was built, but it didn’t insult the integrity of it or its historical significance.”

Likewise, the Missouri Historical Society used a photograph of the House in their literature, and it is now on their tour route, and the Missouri History Museum brought one of their tours through it, as well.

The House was sold to Bridgeton for $1 by Elizabeth Gentry Sayad and her mother, when it became too much to take care of, and the family wanted it preserved. “Elizabeth was a great motivator in helping to get it on the National Register,” says Keirle. “It was preserved for all time as a historic dwelling, and that was not easy to do.” “They wanted to make sure there was a monument to the family,” Lay elaborates.

Elizabeth Gentry Sayad is an accomplished musician, author, pianist, and world traveler. “As a child, she came out and played in the yard until she was a teenager,” muses Keirle. “Then boys came around, and her dad wouldn’t let her out there anymore.”

Keirle adds, “When it was not popular, the ladies of the family went to college, which was unheard of at the time. It was a well-traveled family, also. They had a pioneer spirit that carried through even to today. Elizabeth had to learn spinning wheel, because her father wanted her to know what it was like to live out here.”

The House was dedicated in October 1966, and the whole area that it currently sits on is called Gentry Park. Much of the furnishings are original, including items in the doctor’s office, as well as garments and the exterior grounds. The doctor’s actual journal is on display, as are diaries kept by the ladies of the family.

Keirle and Lay invite those interested to take a tour, available on the first and third Sunday of every month, or to take the popular Candlelight Tour on the first and second Saturday and Sunday of December. Private tours are also available for a very modest fee, by contacting Lay at the Bridgeton Community Center. Groups such as the Boy and Girl Scouts, Red Hat Society, and senior groups have taken advantage of such tours. Replicas of the journal and diaries are for sale, as well as a book about herb gardens (Dr. Payne sold his own medicine.) and various other items. People can also make donations to the Payne-Gentry Endowment Fund, to help preserve this local gem.